“Jocelyn.” She set her hand over his wrist. “Jocelyn.” She did not know what she needed to say. But he understood.
“Slick and warm and ready,” he said, his mouth coming to hers again. “I am going to mount, Jane. Lie still and stay relaxed. When I am deep, we will begin the final pleasure.”
“Come,” she said to him. “Oh, please come.”
His whole weight bore her down into the mattress, holding her immobile while his thighs came between hers and pressed them wide and his hands slid beneath her. By sheer instinct she twined her legs about his. And then he raised his head and looked down into her face, his eyes heavy-lidded with passion. But not blind passion. He looked deep into her own eyes.
And then she felt him hard against the pulsing ache of her entrance. And pressing through it, pushing slowly but firmly, filling her, stretching her, alarming her. There was the sudden premonition of pain, the certainty that he could come no farther. He was too big.
“Jane.” There was something like contrition in his eyes. “If I could only take the pain for you. But it always falls to the woman to do the suffering.” He pushed hard, frowning as he gazed into her eyes.
There was an involuntary tensing, a fear of pain, and—and an awareness that the moment had passed, that he was deep. That he was inside her body. And inside her heart. Inside herself. She smiled at him.
“I am still alive.”
He grinned and rubbed his nose across hers.
“That’s my girl,” he said. “I could not expect tears and vapors from Jane Ingleby, could I?”
She clenched her muscles about the unfamiliar thick hardness inside her and closed her eyes to revel in the wonder of it. But he had promised more. And now that the dreaded moment of her lost virginity was over, all the longing, all the aching came flooding back.
“What is the ride?” she asked, opening her eyes again. “Show me, Jocelyn.”
“Lie still if you wish,” he told her. “Ride with me if you wish. There are no rules here in our bed, Jane, and nothing in that foolish contract either that applies to this. Just you and me and what is mutually pleasurable.”
He lowered his head then to rest in her hair on the pillow. He withdrew slowly to the brink of her—and pressed inward again.
There was no pain this time. Only wetness and heat and soon the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of a riding motion to which her own body soon adjusted and matched. A carnal, energetic, blissful mating of bodies that was focusedthere, where her woman’s body had opened to him and his man’s body had penetrated deep. And yet the sensation went beyond that localized physical point. This was the mating of man and woman, of Jocelyn and Jane. It was a ride to union, to that wordless moment at which the I and the you of the two of them would lose focus and meaning. The moment in which the plurality of we would become singular.
Desire, yearning, need—all became pain and reaching, reaching…
“Now, Jane.” He lifted his head again. His lips touched hers. His eyes looked into her own. “Now. Come. Come with me. Now, Jane.”
Yes, now. All the way. Now. All the way to nothingness, to everything. To oblivion, to the ultimate knowing. To oneness.
Yes, now.
“Jocelyn!”
Someone cried his name. Someone murmured hers.
She felt a final, blissful gush of heat and knew that the mating was complete.
There was murmuring after that, and lightness and coolness as he moved off her, and more murmuring, and the comfort of his damp chest against hers as he drew her onto her side against him, his arm about her, and the coziness of bedcovers over her shoulders.
“Jane.” She heard her name once more. “I am not sure you are still capable of saying you are alive.”
She smiled sleepily. “Mmm,” she said with a sigh. “Is this heaven, then?”
She was too tired to hear his chuckle. She slid into a delicious slumber.
JOCELYN DID NOT SLEEP. He was thoroughly sated but also uneasy. What the devil had he been babbling? He hoped she had not been listening.
Of course she had been listening.
What they had just done had been done together. They had not been separate entities giving and taking a purely physical pleasure. They had been—damnation, he could not stop thinking the way he had been speaking. He had become her, and she had become him. Not that that was it either. They had both, together, become a new entity that was both of them and neither of them.
He was going to end up in Bedlam if he was not careful.
